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I know it sounds banal, but I’d like to revisit the question: “What is conversion rate optimization.”

If you search Google, the answer seems obvious enough. The first result, from Moz, defines it as, “the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise.”

That seems right to me.

Then why do so many articles, courses, lectures and talks focus on conversion rate optimization tactics?

These articles – some of which include hundreds of tips and tactics – include advice like “use high-quality images” and “offer free shipping.”

These are assuredly good pieces of advice.

One would assume high–quality images would perform better than low-quality images (subjectiveness aside), and I’m sure customers delight in not having to pay for free shipping (though operationally, this adds some complexity).

Any single tactic or tip on this list is not in itself conversion optimization (or growth or growth hacking or experimentation or whatever word you’re using for the practice of evidence-based decision making).

For the sake of this article, I’m going to say conversion optimization and growth, by and large, are pretty much the same thing.

Growth usually encompasses product and marketing, whereas conversion optimization usually just looks at the website experience, though that seems to be a pretty minor distinguishment in the grand scheme of things. Both of these things encourage experimentation, data-driven decision making, and fast learning and iteration.

And people have a ton of “growth hacking tips” and tactics:

However, without context none of this is helpful. Would the aspiring growth hacker or conversion optimizer just run down each list and implement each thing? Test each thing individually?

CRO tactics vs. strategy (and operating systems)

The first learning from these searches is that people misunderstand tactics and strategies and use the words interchangeably.

Strategy is the “overarching plan or set of goals.” Tactics “are the specific actions or steps you undertake to accomplish your strategy.”

For instance, if it were my strategy to appear as a growth thought leader (whatever that means), one tactic in my toolbelt may be writing articles like this. Another may be doing webinars hosted on my personal website. Another might be doing local meetups.

For my role at HubSpot, I could carve out a strategy to appear at every possible organic location for bottom funnel search results. Tactically, this could mean writing listicles like our “best help desk software” article. It could also mean getting more customer reviews to lift our prominence on review sites that already appear near the top of Google for these terms.

Now, I think that CRO or growth should neither be looked at as a strategy nor as a tactic. It should be viewed as an operating system.

An operating system, removed slightly from its technical origins, defines the rules, functions, heuristics and mannerisms that control a system. In short, it’s a code (both implicit and explicit) that defines how decisions are made.

What this means practically is that a conversion optimizer or growth hacker should look much less like a vigilante ninja, complete with both a broad and simultaneously specialized skill set, who can come in and optimize a landing page or fix a referral loop.

Instead, the practice should look much more like building and maintaining infrastructure.

This is an idea inspired in part by Ed Fry (from this blog post and from several conversations). In his article, he distinguishes marketing (those who write the copy, launch the campaigns, define the brand) from growth (the scientific method, which has come a long way in marketing due to technological enablement like front-end testing tools).

He writes:

“Our observation is growth enables marketing, product, sales and other teams across the organization. It sits at an operational role, supporting multiple teams across the company, and rolls up to Operations or the CEO. This is not about managing marketing activities that have to happen every day. Growth is far more concerned about moving levers behind the sales & marketing activity instead of the functional practices of campaigns, brand, and so on.”

This is where I think CRO (or growth) thrives, particularly as a company expands in size and sophistication.

No matter how you cut it, the process usually looks something like this:

We collect data and information, put it through our proprietary growth or CRO process (made up of a unique blend of technology, processes and humans), and our output is better decisions and experiences for our users.

But why should that live within the purview of one person or even one team? What if we could enable everyone in the company to make better decisions, systematically?

Where does CRO fit into the company structure?

CRO teams tend to be either centralized or decentralized (or in growth parlance, independent or function-led).

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In a centralized model, everything flows through that team, resulting in a more structured and predictable system, but can perhaps become bottlenecked if other teams want to join in. Here’s an article about the relative pros and cons of each model.

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There’s a third model as well that I see more often now, particularly in large organizations with sophisticated experimentation programs: the center of excellence model.

Ronny Kohavi talked about this in an HBR article and explains it like this:

“A center of excellence focuses mostly on the design, execution, and analysis of controlled experiments. It significantly lowers the time and resources those tasks require by building a companywide experimentation platform and related tools. It can also spread best testing practices throughout the organization by hosting classes, labs, and conferences.”

In other words, if we move to a center of excellence model, CRO or growth teams can focus on building up three components of company infrastructure:

• Technical ability (tools)
• Education and best practices
• Attitudes/beliefs (culture)

CRO should support technical enablement and tooling

First and foremost, to build a company where everyone can run experiments and make better decisions, it’s important to give people the tools and technology needed to do that. I think that falls under three areas:

• Data
• Experimentation capabilities
• Knowledge sharing

To make better decisions, we need better data. A growth or CRO team can help implement, orchestrate and access the data each team needs to make better decisions.

Of course, there are a million tools on the market, ranging from the free and ubiquitous (Google Analytics) to the enterprise (Adobe Analytics) to the custom setups loved in technical organizations.

There’s no right choice for every organization, but it’s an important decision to discuss.

The second point is to decide on an experimentation framework or platform. Again, there are tons of tools available, ranging from free (Google Optimize) to enterprise to custom built.

How you set this up should have a lot to do with your organization’s technical capabilities, culture and functional needs. Echoing the above, there’s no easy answer here – but here’s a really interesting paper on how Microsoft has built their experimentation platform.

Finally, knowledge sharing is probably the most underrated. Assuming you have several teams running trustworthy experiments, delivering better experiences and getting results – the next logical piece in the puzzle is to allow archiving and communicating these results.

Education, training and best practices

The second component of infrastructure is education. If you’re going to democratize experiments, then you’ll want to make sure everyone knows how to run them.

Personally, I love the Airbnb model – they send employees through Data University to train everyone in the fundamentals.

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I realize this is a heavy up-front and top-down effort, so it doesn’t need to be as robust right off the bat. Your team could simply act as an internal consultancy, holding office hours and supporting interested teams when they run experiments. Normally it takes a small ramp up period before the team or the analyst/marketer is off and running by themselves.

At the very least, documenting how to set up and analyze experiments is something that should be done. Having a resource center, or at the very least a checklist or list of guidelines like I’ve tried to put together in this article, helps people feel more comfortable running their own tests properly.

Empowering a culture of experimentation

Finally, the last component of infrastructure is the subtle and the emotional. CRO and growth teams should be cheerleaders for evidence-based decision making, experimentation and the judicious use of data in campaigns.

I’ve written a lot about building a culture of experimentation in the past and can’t say there’s any one tip or tactic or magic bullet to do it.

Often, the best way is to have a powerful and influential evangelist at the top leading the way.

Sometimes it’s built up through the bottom through consistently showing results and disseminating them through the company via Wiki posts, newsletters, and weekly experiment readouts.

This may be the most important job of the CRO or growth team, as it builds a sort of “flywheel” effect. The more excited others are about growth and experimentation, the more they’re willing to learn and improve their own skill sets, and the more evangelists you’ll have for the program – a perpetual motion device of data-driven decision making that will surely help you edge out past the competition in the long run.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. A range of platforms is available to marketers depending on their firm’s size, budget and level of digital marketing sophistication.

The more basic functions of marketing automation have become somewhat commoditized, so platform vendors mostly look to differentiate their platforms based on the ability to scale, as well as usability, ease of implementation and customer experience.

MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software in your business.

This 48-page report includes profiles of 14 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. If you are a marketer looking to adopt a marketing automation software platform, you need to read this report. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download your copy.

New data from famed internet analyst Mary Meeker suggests online advertising and e-commerce growth may be slowing, but that doesn’t make these channels any less important for marketers to maximize.

Online Advertising

Although digital ad spend increased 1% over last year, the revenues are slowing down – dropping by 9% between the end of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, according to the report.

Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report | Source: Company public releases & Morgan Stanley estimates

Google still reigns supreme in terms of ad platform revenue, with Facebook following behind it. However, platforms like Amazon, Twitter, Snap and Pinterest are gaining share, showing an average ad revenue growth rate of 2.6% over the last three years (compared to Google’s 1.4% increase and Facebook’s 1.9% increase).

Programmatic ad buying has seen a 42% increase from 2012, which Meeker says is having a negative impact on ad inventory pricing across the board.

But despite the relative slowdown, Meeker pointed to key factors that will continue propelling ad share forward, including improved targeting capabilities, better creative and machine learning technology.

E-Commerce

Although e-commerce sales now account for 15% of all retail purchases, Meeker reported that the growth rate is slowing down when stacked against previous years. E-commerce as a whole saw revenue growth barely inching up year-over-year, with the first quarter of 2019 showing a 12.4% growth rate – as opposed to the 12.1% growth rate of last year.

Even with the slowdown, e-commerce revenues still exceed brick-and-mortar revenues, which grew only 2% in the first quarter.

Direct -to-consumer brands are capitalizing on rich consumer data with deeper personalization, resulting in more innovative strategies and a higher consumer satisfaction than ever before. But even so, the cost of customer acquisition is climbing to unsustainable levels.

Still crucial, despite slowing down

Despite flattening trends in ad spend and revenue growth, make no mistake: e-commerce (and digital advertising, by extension) will still remain a crucial factor in the marketing mix for online brands. In our connected digital ecosystem, new technologies, innovative media, and the rise in global internet adoption means more fragmentation across the consumer spectrum, which ultimately amounts to less concentrated growth.

Audiences and business goals vary from brand to brand, but e-commerce marketers and advertisers should still be looking at long-term strategies through the lens of the online trends as a whole.

When you’ve worked in paid search for as long as I have, you’ve undoubtedly received emails from your clients that all go a little something like the one given below.

Hi [insert your name here],

Revenue is looking a little lighter than usual this month versus last year. What can we do to close the gap? Please let me know by EOD today.

Thanks,

[insert client name here]

Short, sweet, and oh-so-stressful, or at least it used to be. But now? Well, this isn’t your first rodeo, my fellow PPC partner, you’re prepared. Placed firmly in your holster is a solution that’s fully loaded. Ok, enough with the quick draw metaphors, let’s dig into how to respond, assuming the following criteria are being met:

• You can confirm the trends your client is seeing.
• Brand checks out (since it accounts for the majority of your revenue at any given moment):
  1. Brand terms are maxed out aka meeting or exceeding a certain impression share threshold.
  2. You are serving against the same brand terms as last year, but if not they are at least being caught by BMM.
  3. No new competitors have entered the auction or suddenly become more aggressive, causing CPCs to rise and in turn, cause traffic and revenue to fall behind.
• The right ads are active and all available real estate is being utilized.

Find yourself checking all the boxes? This is usually indicative of brand demand decline, a trend that is all too common among online retailers due primarily to the rise of Amazon. Yo, Bezos! What gives? As a secondary check, we use Google Trends to confirm brand demand decline. But if all the boxes above are checked, odds are the plague is real. Fortunately, you’ve got the silver bullet (metaphor alert). Unfortunately, your client may shoot you down before you’re able to use it. Why? Because that silver bullet is non-brand.

I’m serious, and I’d be happy to explain

All too often we neglect non-brand CPC advertising because, in the client’s eyes, it’s seen as one or all of the following:

• Too expensive
• Too competitive
• A lot of work for a little payoff
• Not beneficial to the bottom line

And most of the time, they’re completely right. Hard to argue with that, right? Wrong. Focusing purely on search text, non-brand has the power to close the gap widened over time by brand demand decline. However, there are stipulations. Most importantly, we’ve got to stop measuring the success, or validity, of non-brand based on last-click attribution. If we stay this course, the tactic will continue to be deprioritized and defunded and basically never given a chance.

Think of non-brand collectively as those keywords in your account that ads rarely get a chance to serve against because bids aren’t competitive enough. Instead, Non-Brand success should be measured based on its multi-touch influence. There are several apt attribution models out there, the trick is honing in on one that both you and your client can agree on. This usually requires both parties to do a bit of extra digging up front.

For example, one of my clients made the decision to increase its non-brand investment after (a) being plagued by brand demand decline and (b) learning that each time our non-brand investment increased, omnichannel sales — both grew online and offline. This happened outside of peak online retail season, too, so it wasn’t just an anomaly. From that moment on, we stopped viewing non-brand as a last-click attribution tactic and started assigning a certain multiplier to the last-click revenue it generated to better defend our investment. Positive by-products of this change included:

• Increased brand awareness, resulting in more Brand searches which helped to reverse the downward trend caused by brand demand decline.
• New customer acquisition, resulting in larger audience pools and more efficient spend, particularly in Non-Brand where audiences are often applied (why inflate brand CPCs by bidding up on audiences there?)
• Greater SERP ownership by serving non-brand and PLAs simultaneously for certain products, resulting in higher visibility and CTR.

If you’re like me, even overwhelmingly positive change can be scary, so during this time, I kept my eyes peeled for the first hint of danger. Surprisingly, negative by-products of this change were sparse and totally manageable:

1. Higher CPCs, resulting in a lower last-click ROAS, pre-multiplier
   • Solution: Created alerts using proprietary tech that pinged us on Slack when CPCs rose considerably (also set max bid rules)
2. Larger potential for keyword and ad copy/extension misalignment
   • Solution: Created an Excel macros doc for fast-n-easy creation of new campaign/ad group/keyword structures, including a tab for ad group-to-ad copy concatenation + rigorous QA process (Manager > Senior Manager > Lead = Live)

Still not convinced?

One of our wiser presidents, FDR, once said,

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

That’s really all your client is asking of you. If it fails, it fails, then you move on to the next thing. In the meantime, however, here are some thoughts to get you started:

• Consider investing as much as you did last year in non-brand, at a minimum.
• Investment level could also be just enough to maintain a certain impression share threshold on various high-visibility products, especially if your competitors are less visible or non-existent in those spaces.
• Try to maintain a steady investment level — even if it’s on the lower end, so as not to inflate CPCs by erratically pausing/enabling, as we undeniably tend to do with non-brand.
• Running display? At least with non-brand search, people are actively looking for products associated with those terms (pull media) versus being served an ad for certain products regardless of search intent (push media)

What are your thoughts on non-brand CPC advertising? Share them in the comments.

Katy Winans is a Senior SEM Manager at PMG.

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The long-term benefits can help advertisers gain up to 40% cost savings, have a significant impact on profitability, and free up budget for new customers.

For search marketers, YouTube offers access to 1.9 billion logged-in global users per month, making it the second largest search engine. And, Google reports that advertisers buying YouTube video ads in addition to search ads see, on average, 8% higher search conversion volume, 3% higher search conversion rates and 4% lower search CPAs (compared to advertisers who only run search ads).

However, YouTube’s automated bidding algorithm isn’t right for everyone. At SMX Advanced, Ashley Mo, regional director for 3Q Digital, discussed a few intelligent tactics that can improve your video campaign performance. Listen to her full Insights session below and head to the bottom for the full transcript.

Mo also provided Search Engine Land readers with some additional tips on automated bidding:

• If you don’t have any conversion history for YouTube campaigns in your account, start with Max Conversions bidding and switch to Target CPA after the account has generated at least 30 conversions.
• Wait at least 7-10 days prior to making bid changes. It is normal for performance to fluctuate, but over a 30 day period following an initial learning period, performance should be more stable. Use volume as an indicator of whether to change bids.
• Campaign structure – separate different targeting types at the campaign level. As much as you may be tempted to, don’t change ad group level bids when making optimizations, always change at the campaign level.
• Don’t overlay targeting on top of Custom Intent. This will reduce reach for users who have already expressed intent through their search behavior.
• Consider testing micro-conversions like pageviews or an intermediate conversion if volume is limited.
• Use different call-to-actions (with the same video creative) to see if you can improve CTR.

Transcript

GN:

This is the Search Engine Land podcast and I am your host George Nguyen. What you’re about to listen to, in particular, is an edition of SMXcast — content that comes straight from our SMX conference speakers and attendees.

You’re about to hear from Ashley Mo, a regional director at 3Q Digital. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, she delivered an Insights session on outsmarting YouTube’s automated bidding to drive more conversions. Enjoy and happy advertising.

AM:

Hi everyone. My name is Ashley. I have a lot of experience working with clients across verticals and specifically in YouTube. We’ve been working on trying to make it work for direct response, not just awareness and have managed to do that successfully with over $5 million in YouTube investment and hopefully a lot more. And, last year we took home Google’s premiere partner award in video innovation and, lucky for you all today, I’m going to share all of my secrets.

So to start off, the biggest news to YouTube is really that Google released TrueView for action into public beta this year. Some of you may have tested it last year, but now anyone can test it. So, by quick show of hands, who here has already run YouTube TrueView for action campaigns? Okay, it looks like maybe 5%, which is great that you’re here because I’m about to talk to you about why you should be testing it.

So, first, what is TrueView for action? So, if you are watching videos on YouTube, you’ve probably already been seeing these videos. This is an example of an ad and notably there’s this call to action overlay, which is designed to take someone outside of YouTube. So, that’s really the biggest difference here is before YouTube was focused on having branding campaigns and they wanted people to stay engaged and stay within the platform. And now they’re trying to monetize it and they realize that for advertisers to be successful, they need to be able to drive people to their landing page or to their app, because then they have a chance to take action. Whereas if they’re watching a video, maybe they’ll convert later. It’ll be a view through conversion. It’s hard to measure. So, by creating TrueView for action with a call to action overlay and the companion banner on the side, it’s making it easier for people on desktop, on mobile, on tablet to click on the ad and to engage and potentially convert.

So, why as search marketers, should we care about YouTube? It is a different platform even though it’s still available in the same Google Ads UI. So, a couple of statistics, there’s a ton of people on YouTube watching videos. I mean who here watches videos on YouTube? Probably everyone, right? So 1.9 billion people, 1 billion hours is a completely difficult to fathom and you might not think of YouTube as a search engine, but it is, and it’s actually the second largest search engine right after Google, so a great place to expand from search. And then based on some research that Google has done, they’ve seen that advertisers who run YouTube in addition to search ended up seeing an 8% higher search conversion volume and 3% higher search conversion rate. So there is actual incrementality by running both campaigns. And I can say anecdotally, we worked with a video streaming client and we used to run keywords on videos in their library. No one was searching for those, period. Sometimes those keywords wouldn’t even serve. And then when we started to promote them heavily on YouTube, we started to see searches for those and conversions. So it definitely does drive impact and with TrueView for action, it’s going to be easier to measure what happens after someone sees your ad. So that’s why you should care about YouTube.

And then the next question is, well, how exactly do I make it work for me? How do I drive conversions? This is really the tough part. So I have three tips for you today, but please come talk to me after if you want to learn more. I could talk for hours about YouTube. So my first tip is that contrary to what Google tells you, I think you should actually limit your reach when you first launch a campaign. Especially nowadays you have to use target CPA, which is automated bidding, with a TrueView for action campaign. It’s machine learning, so it takes time to learn. And if you allow it to target anyone across YouTube.com or the video partner network on desktop or mobile, it could very easily spend hundreds of dollars, not drive many conversions and you’ve already used up a large portion of your budget before you even gotten meaningful results. So I would say that you should always start conservatively. Think about what works for you on search. I think, for the most part, desktop-only targeting is going to work better than mobile as well as opting out of video partners. I can say that from experience, the YouTube.com traffic is premium. We see people click at a much higher rate and convert at a much higher rate. So just make sure you go through all of your campaign settings when you set up your campaign to make sure that you’re not — uncheck a lot of the things that Google defaults to, to make sure you’re kind of limiting the scope of it. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t ever run on mobile, because that is where over half of the YouTube views are. But, once you see that performance is consistent and that the target CPA stabilizes, then you can use that as an option to expand for scale.

So next tip is — this is pretty exciting for anyone who’s new to running on YouTube — you can actually use some of your insights from your search campaigns on YouTube with the new custom intent targeting, which is only available with TrueView for action. So you can actually target people who are actively researching your brand or your competitors or even non-brand keywords with video ads. You just pump in all the keywords and it creates an audience and then you can target that group. And some of the best practices here are going to be the same as search: You wouldn’t put all your different keyword types into one campaign. You’d want to separate them out so you can more easily measure performance. So I’d recommend setting up different buckets based on different categories like your search campaigns: so brand, competitor prospecting, etc. And that way, after you launch, you can kind of see how the audiences perform relative to each other.

So final tip is about creative. So anyone who’s run any type of video campaign knows that created is the most important thing and that’s what’s going to be key to success. And I know a lot of times it can be hard when you don’t have a lot of bandwidth or creative resources. I can’t tell you how many times clients say, “Oh, we just have this one video. Just go and run with it.” And the problem with that is that if that video doesn’t work well, then well then what do you do, right? You can have the best targeting and the wrong video and you’re not going to hit achieve any success on YouTube. So you should at least have multiple creatives. And that way you can compare performance. And then when your campaign, if it doesn’t do well, then you can see, well, did the view rate vary between the videos? Did the click through rate vary? You have something to compare. Another point about creative is that you don’t necessarily need a high-production video. I’ve seen clients have success with kind of low production where they take still images and kind of create this slide show. There are a lot of great tools out there, like Shakr is one of them, where they have pre-built templates and you can plug in existing images and assets and create a video. So definitely look into those options if you are having trouble coming up with multiple videos.

It is important that you’re captivating your audience very early on. Even though your goal with this campaign is not going to be — your number one goal is going to be at least click through rate; maybe conversion rate. But, if you have a low view rate on your video, then it’s not engaging, so make sure that you’re getting their attention right away.

So, just to recap this very short presentation: number one, limit your traffic to desktop traffic only on YouTube.com, and then make sure that you are using existing knowledge you have from search, testing that in YouTube, and make sure you have more than one creative. Thank you.

Understanding how search engines rank websites and applying simple nontechnical SEO strategies will lead to increased traffic from qualified customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique used to assure that customers searching for a product or service can easily find a company’s website on search engines such as Google. Just as a physical location is essential for brick-and-mortar stores, search engine rankings are essential in driving walk-in traffic to a website.

How potential or qualified customers find websites for a product or service

1. Direct traffic

A user finds a website by typing the web address directly into a browser or by clicking on a bookmark or an email link. These are typically customers that are familiar with the company and are maybe repeat visitors.

2. Referrals

Users are directed to websites by clicking on a link from another website. For example, linking from a Facebook page to a corporate website would produce referral traffic. Ideally, referrals will be qualified customers possessing a desire to buy products from the website they are referred to.

3. Search engines

Analyze web content and create a ranking of websites that most likely will correspond to keywords that a customer uses to search for information. For example, typing the keywords “search engine optimization” in a Google search will provide a list of websites that provide information or services dealing with SEO.

Generally, a company has more control over direct or referral traffic than over search engine traffic. In addition, direct and referral traffic is influenced more by an organization’s offline marketing. SEO seeks to provide a strategy for improving a website ranking resulting in increased traffic to that website.

Two types of search engine results that appear

1. Pay per click (PPC)

These results are usually prominently displayed on top or on the side of the search results. To attain these listings, companies enroll in services like Google Adwords to budget resources into certain keywords and pay a fee whenever a customer clicks on the link. A well-orchestrated PPC campaign is the quickest way to drive qualified traffic to a website.

2. Organic or natural results

These are the rank-ordered results provided below the PPC results. These results are attained on the merits of the website and are not purchased. However, since most customers will not look at several pages of search results, a high organic placement, preferably in the top three positions, is necessary to succeed in driving qualified traffic to a website.

How search engines rank websites

The criteria used to rank websites in search results vary by the search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the others) which are constantly evolving. Although these criteria are not publicized, general strategies applied consistently over time will increase website rankings. Despite promises offered by some SEO companies, attaining a high search engine ranking will not happen overnight.

Although the exact formulas are not widely publicized, search engines provide high ranks to websites that are relevant, important, trustworthy, authoritative, and popular. Any strategy that seeks to increase these five criteria, will ultimately improve your search engine optimization.

Five non-technical strategies for SEO

1. Improve relevance by writing better web copy

Writing better web copy that focuses on how a product meets customer needs will help to improve your search engine rankings. In addressing the needs of the customer, web copy will naturally be filled with rich keywords. Avoid writing copy specifically designed to increase web rankings. Ultimately a website needs to be written for customers and not web rankings.

2. Improve by increasing the number and quality of inbound links

Search engines look at both the number and the quality of those links when determining rankings. By registering with web directories like DMOZ or getting referral traffic from high traffic sites like Wikipedia, websites can improve site visibility and perceived importance. Companies can increase links to their site by regularly providing new and entertaining content. Providing content including videos, games, and other interactive features that people want to share with their friends is a great way to encourage other websites to link to yours.

3. Become trustworthy by being ethical

Questionable tactics like providing pages with long lists of keywords and little usable content will eventually lead to penalties by search engines. Encouraging trust among customers, just like in brick-and-mortar business, is important in increasing sales and search engine ranking. Provide customers with a contact page and give them the opportunity to comment on products and services received.

4. Become an authority by networking

Develop a reputation as an authority with a product or service by using networking sites such as LinkedIn or by creating blogs and topic relevant articles or whitepapers. Over time customers will begin to associate the company with being an expert on the products and services it offers. Not only will this perceived authority increase traffic to the website, but it will also ultimately increase search rankings.

5. Increase popularity by encouraging repeat visitors

Marketing is a long-term proposition aimed at meeting and satisfying customer need. Satisfying customer need will encourage repeat visitors and repeat visitors will increase traffic. By providing relevant, interactive content that is demanded by customers, the website will become more popular and ranking will increase over time.

When using nontechnical techniques, sound marketing principles will ultimately lead to increased web rankings. If you’re looking for technical SEO strategies you can use Google Webmaster Tools.

Got any strategies you would like to talk about? Share them in the comments.

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This week, Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify launched its brand new Shopify Fulfillment Network for US-based merchants. The new network uses Shopify’s machine learning-driven smart inventory allocation technology to determine the closest and most efficient fulfillment centers for your business. 

Why we should care

For SMBs being edged out by giants like Amazon, accessibility to an inventory fulfillment network — and the integrated technologies — could play a key role in helping small businesses stay competitive and allow them to grow.

According to Shopify, the new system does not require advanced technical skills. Thanks to this, the system can be used by busy digital marketers operating with limited resources to market products and drive e-commerce sales.

More on the news

• Shopify is working with fulfillment partners in Nevada, California, Texas, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
• Shopify also announced upgrades to its Shopify Plus experience.
• Shopify is also launching a new Shopify point-of-sale system.

Managing an online reputation is a 21st-century business responsibility that simply cannot be ignored, or even placed on the backburner for any amount of time.

The online world of consumerism runs 24/7. It doesn’t take holidays, time off, or even a two-minute break. Regardless of what business ideas you might have, managing an online reputation comes with the turf. Even for small businesses with relatively low brand awareness, developing a bulletproof system is crucial for every growth-minded organization.

Now, as a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), you are probably dedicating a good deal of your budget to sales, marketing, production, etc. In other words, you are spending money to simply get to a point where you have an online reputation. The prospect of managing it is probably some ways down your list.

The good news is you don’t need a giant budget to manage an online reputation. If you play your cards right, you can stay on top of this crucial task with pocket change. Here’s how.

Take advantage of cost-effective or free monitoring tools

In the early stages of managing an online reputation, it’s relatively easy to stay on top of things like brand mentions, reviews, social media interactions, etc. However, as business picks up and you begin to build a decent online presence, it’s going to get harder and harder to keep tabs.

As a general rule of online reputation management, it’s always best to have tools and processes in place before you actually need them. Obviously, you don’t need anything fancy (at least not yet). Start by setting up Google Alerts to get a notification every time your brand name is mentioned.

Another good (and free) tool to use is IFTTT.com. This helps you connect all of your apps and devices so any online activity related to your business is quickly brought to your attention, no matter where you are.

In terms of social media listening, the free Hootsuite plan is a fantastic place to start keeping tabs on your presence across major networks. In addition to monitoring your mentions, this tool helps you schedule content delivery and manage your online sentiment.

All three of these tools are fantastic in laying the groundwork for online reputation management. The sooner you get your processes established, the better off you will be as your business begins to scale.

Create an outreach system to gain high-value user content

Customer reviews are an integral part of online reputation management. Moreover, they are perhaps the most influential pieces of content when it comes to purchasing decisions. To give you an idea, a study from Invespcro found that nearly 90% of consumers trust online reviews from strangers as much as a personal recommendation.

Source: Invesp

With this in mind, one of the biggest components to building an online reputation is simply getting people to leave sentiment about your business. This is an interesting task. While it might not seem like it on the surface, the very concept of online reviews has evolved quite a bit over the years.

To give a brief history, online reviews first emerged around 1999 and early 2000s during the Clinton impeachment. They were then used for patients to review doctors. As time went on, online reviews became a popular form of user-generated content for all businesses and products.

Realizing just how powerful they were in swaying purchasing decisions, many businesses would try shady tactics like forging fake reviews or paying others to write them. As many of the big review platforms started to crack down on these practices, consumers also started to wise up. Nowadays, most online customers have a strong radar for made-up reviews and are not swayed by a simple star rating and a vague sentence – regardless of whether they are real or not.

So where does this leave you?

As you develop a strategy for gathering online sentiment, you need an outreach process that encourages top-to-bottom feedback. This involves getting the pros, cons, overview, advice to the company, etc.

Now, you are kind of between a rock and a hard place here. On one hand, you want to get super in-depth, detailed reviews. On the other, you don’t want to make the forms too complex that people don’t want to fill them out.

In terms of the review form itself, the key is to create simplistic questions that ideally spur open-ended answers like the ones given below.

• What were the pros?
• What were the cons?
• What advice would you give to us?
• What advice would you give to other consumers?

These are just a few to keep in mind.

When it comes to developing an outreach system, there are several key guidelines to live by

1. Don’t jump the gun 

Most of the time, you don’t want to follow up with a review request immediately after the purchase. Give it a day or two before you reach out.

2. Make it easy 

Always remember, customers, are doing you a big favor by leaving their feedback. You don’t want to make them jump through a bunch of hoops. Be sure the forms you build are easily-integrated with email, mobile, or whatever apps you use.

3. Make the best use of social media

Social media can be a gold mine for feedback and engagement. Try asking general questions and using hashtags to get responses out of your followers.

Source: Twitter

4. Make them visible

The purpose of reviews is to present an unfiltered, third-party opinion of your business. In addition to social media and the major review platforms, make it a point to showcase reviews on your website, both the good and the bad.

Source: Bizzabo.com

At the end of the day, your outreach strategy is the guiding force behind developing your online presence. Take your time here and find the formula that works best.

Develop a plan for negative feedback

Getting negative online feedback is simply part of life in today’s business world, there is no getting around it. Dealing with negative feedback is a lot like washing dishes; no one particularly likes it, but you have to clean up the mess before it accumulates and gets out of hand.

Now, dealing with negative feedback isn’t always apples-to-apples.

For starters, as you look into customer review platforms, you need to take extra precaution to understand how it filters out fake or biased reviews. Fortunately, review technology has come a long way. Many of the bigger platforms have methods of pinpointing when companies try to sidestep the process. The last thing you want is for a competitor to sabotage you.

In the case you get some genuinely poor feedback, you need to have a plan to approach it. First and foremost, do not respond right away. Give it some time to marinate. You never want to respond immediately while emotions are high. Wait at least 12 hours to respond, and no longer than two to three days.

When it comes to responding, there are a few key points to remember

1. Thank them for taking the time to leave a review.
2. Accept responsibility.
3. Respond rationally while staying true to your brand voice.
4. Be concise in your response.
5. Don’t throw yourself under the bus too far.
6. Try to take the conversation offline.

Here is an excellent example of how to respond to a bad review

Source: Broadly

A bad review, while it may seem harsh at first, can actually be a good thing. Ultimately, the way you handle negative reviews says a lot more about your company than the review itself. Additionally, Google recently confirmed that responding to reviews impacts local SEO.

If you approach the situation carefully, you can turn a negative into a long-standing positive.

Know when it’s time to hire someone

As a small business grows, the task of managing an online reputation will obviously become more tedious. If you are carrying out these duties as an owner, you need to know where to draw the line and decide when it’s time to hire someone.

Developing a small business requires much, much more than keeping up with an online reputation. If you are finding that your time commitment here is overshadowing other important jobs, it’s probably time to step back and hand over the job to someone else.

Generally speaking, if you are spending more than one or two hours per day covering the duties involved with managing an online reputation, consider bringing someone on – at least part-time.

As you are likely on a small budget, it can be tough to justify this overhead. However, keep in mind that growing an online reputation never truly ends. Having someone solely dedicated to this task is an investment that will save you time, money, and headaches in the future.

Over to you

Online reputation management is a job you need to take very seriously, no matter how big or small your business is.

SMBs currently exist at an interesting point in time. They are growing their business when online sentiment plays a critical role in sales. Developing a robust plan and protocol for managing an online reputation early on is an integral part of long term success. Fortunately, doing so with a little-to-no budget is easier than ever.

Manish Dudharejia is the President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc.

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The importance of online reviews is undeniable. Let’s talk about a few big ones in making online reviews one of the strongest weapons in your SEO arsenal.

This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while. I threw the question out to SEO Twitter, and was surprised and impressed by the volume of responses.

SEO expert Craig Campbell shares his experience on digital and flipping websites, pro tips, mistakes to avoid, conferences, and a lot more!

It’s important to think about the search intent of potential customers. Explore user intent and learn to use this complex system to improve website ranking.

SEOs are always scouring the internet and exhausting their networks trying to find new ways to optimize websites for Google and other search engines. Whether they are tips to improve page speed or new keywords to target, the work of an SEO seems to be never-ending.

However, rather than chasing new visitors to increase your site traffic, the key to search performance could be found outside of search engine marketing altogether.

Quickly envision the process of successful conversion from a Google search:

• Step one: The user enters their query into Google.
• Step two: Google generates a SERP based on its perception of the type of content that that user is looking for.
• Step three: The user analyzes the metadata displayed on the SERP and selects the link that will most likely solve their needs.
• Step four: This is the make-or-break moment where the user decides whether or not to bounce or stay on the site to find the information or solution that they searched for.
• Step five: The new visitor quickly connects with and trusts the site they are on. They instantly found the information or product they were searching for or can easily navigate to it to fulfill a purchase or schedule a meeting.

Step four not only illustrates a pivotal moment for SEOs but for Google as well. If a search user consistently clicks through to sites that are slow to load, hard to navigate or entirely irrelevant to their needs, they’re going to switch to a different search engine. In short, Google wants to please its users by highly ranking sites that are friendly to its users’ want.

By shifting your mindset from, “how can I crack the Google algorithm?” to, “how can I delight Google and its users?”, you create a better focus on engagement rather than simply acquiring search volume. Essentially, your search success hinges upon your site’s UX. Two elements of UX are particularly relevant to SEO.

1. Give users an engaging experience

Place yourself in the shoes of searchers. What do you look for when you Google something? It’s probably these three things:

• Fast load speed
• Web design that is industry appropriate and stimulating
• Information that is presented clearly

So, while you study analytics for metrics like time on site and bounce rate, understand that the context of those metrics matters. Why are users sticking around? Is it because they’re truly engaged with your site or is because they’re having troubles finding what they’re searching for? You can utilize heatmapping services to gain a better understanding of how users are truly interacting with your site. Services like Full Story, Looker, Hotjar, Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange, and Optimizely. If you have a favorite comment it below.

Focusing on user experience can help increase traffic; According to a blog post in Think With Google, 1-800-Got-Junk decreased their load time by 28% and received a 19% increase in mobile sessions.

By establishing a strong first impression, you give yourself the best chance of a first-time conversion or, at least, a better chance for a return visit for users in the “shopping around” stage.

How can you make your site more engaging?

Based on your industry and the intent of the page, your design and layout should create an experience for users that feels immersive, natural and frictionless. This means that:

• Your call-outs are clear, but not too flashy.
• Your design (from colors and images to font choice) should command the user’s focus.
• Optimization of speed on desktop and mobile

Once you’ve gained the reader’s attention, seal the deal with engaging and relevant content.

2. Focus on the context of your content

Going through the work of finding relevant keywords and creating insightful and engaging content that looks great is only half of the battle. The other half of the SEO equation is search intent. Let’s say you’re an e-commerce brand creating a product page. It’s pretty clear what your CTA is – “Buy Now”. By focusing the design and copy of this page towards searchers that are in the ready-to-buy mode, you ensure that both Google and its users are happy to have your site at the top of SERPs.

Likewise, if you’re creating a more informative page that is focused on educating viewers on industry insights, news or FAQs, including salesy rhetoric will only set yourself up for failure once visitors are sent to a page that doesn’t support a quick purchase decision.

Create a lingo-free supportive copy that sells your company as a guide to their need. We used a book called BrandStory by Donald Miller to define our website copy. The idea is to create a story that makes your customer the Hero and makes you the guide towards solving their need. You want to create a story people want to be part of, think of Toms Shoes. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart to accomplish this, Just explain who you are and how you will meet the customer’s needs.

Making this type of connection with your customer is a big impact on your sales funnel. A recent study by the Harvard Business Review shows how emotional content can impact your bottom line. In fact, according to HBR a retailer even had a “50% increase in the rate of same-store-sales growth”.

Some great examples of quality “StoryBrand” content Include:

1. Soul Cycle
2. GoPro
3. Uber’s One Billion Ride
4. Mouth

These brands explain a story in which engages a user into becoming the “Hero” of the story. GoPro, for example, gives the customer the experience of recording their moments enjoying life, Making Gopro the “guide” to helping customers remember their adventures.

Even Google tested this on their retail call-to-action by consolidating their content and received an increase of organic traffic by 64%. Quality content is only part of the user experience but can create an impact on your business when it becomes “ego-less” and more about the customer.

The better your site performs in terms of relevancy and engagement, the happier the visitors are going to be. At the end of the day, Google is just looking to please its users too.

Search engine best practices are going to help place your site on Google’s radar. However, what’s going to set you apart from the rest of your competitors on SERPs is your commitment to delivering a high quality and hyper-relevant website to searchers. A newfound emphasis on your site’s UX can be the exact refresher your sites SEO needed.

Jonathan Alonso is Director of Digital Marketing at CNCMachines.Net. He can be found on Twitter at @jongeek.

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This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while. I threw the question out to SEO Twitter, and was surprised and impressed by the volume of responses.

SEO expert Craig Campbell shares his experience on digital and flipping websites, pro tips, mistakes to avoid, conferences, and a lot more!

It’s important to think about the search intent of potential customers. Explore user intent and learn to use this complex system to improve website ranking.

It’s challenging to cover every technical aspect of sites as hundreds of issues may need fixes. Six extremely beneficial areas with actionable tips covered.